Alpaca

Senior Data Platform Engineer

North America

Not SpecifiedCompensation
Senior (5 to 8 years)Experience Level
Full TimeJob Type
UnknownVisa
Financial Services, Brokerage, FintechIndustries

Who We Are

Alpaca is a US-headquartered self-clearing broker-dealer and brokerage infrastructure for stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, fixed income, 24/5 trading, and more. Our recent Series C funding round brought our total investment to over $170 million, fueling our ambitious vision.

Alpaca is a licensed financial services company, serving hundreds of financial institutions across 40 countries with our institutional-grade APIs. This includes broker-dealers, investment advisors, wealth managers, hedge funds, and crypto exchanges, totaling over 6 million brokerage accounts.

Our global team is a diverse group of experienced engineers, traders, and brokerage professionals who are working to achieve our mission of opening financial services to everyone on the planet. We're deeply committed to open-source contributions and fostering a vibrant community, continuously enhancing our award-winning, developer-friendly API and the robust infrastructure behind it.

Alpaca is proudly backed by top-tier global investors, including Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, Social Leverage, Horizons Ventures, Unbound, SBI Group, Derayah Financial, Elefund, and Y Combinator.

Our Team Members

We're a dynamic team of 230+ globally distributed members who thrive working from our favorite places around the world, with teammates spanning the USA, Canada, Japan, Hungary, Nigeria, Brazil, the UK, and beyond! We're searching for passionate individuals eager to contribute to Alpaca's rapid growth. If you align with our core values—Stay Curious, Have Empathy, and Be Accountable—and are ready to make a significant impact, we encourage you to apply.

Your Role

We are seeking a Senior Data Engineer to design and develop the data management layer for our platform to ensure its scalability as we expand to larger customers and new jurisdictions. At Alpaca, data engineering encompasses financial transactions, customer data, API logs, system metrics, augmented data, and third-party systems that impact decision-making for both internal and external users. We process hundreds of millions of events daily, with this number growing as we onboard new customers.

We prioritize open-source solutions in our data management approach, leveraging a Google Cloud Platform (GCP) foundation for our data infrastructure. This includes batch/stream ingestion, transformation, and consumption layers for BI, internal use, and external third-party sinks. Additionally, we oversee data experimentation, cataloging, and monitoring and alerting systems.

Our team is 100% distributed and remote.

Things You Get To Do

  • Design and oversee key forward and reverse ETL patterns to deliver data to relevant stakeholders.
  • Develop scalable patterns in the transformation layer to ensure repeatable integrations with BI tools across various business verticals.
  • Expand and maintain the constantly evolving elements of the Alpaca Data Lakehouse architecture.
  • Collaborate closely with sales, marketing, product, and operations teams to address key data flow needs.
  • Operate the system and manage production issues in a timely manner.

Who You Are (Must-Haves)

  • 7+ years of experience in data engineering, including 2+ years of building scalable, low-latency data platforms capable of handling >100M events/day.
  • Proficiency in at least one programming language, with strong working knowledge of Python and SQL.
  • Experience with cloud-native technologies like Docker, Kubernetes, and Helm.
  • Strong hands-on experience with relational database systems.
  • Experience in building scalable transformation layers, preferably through formalized SQL models (e.g., dbt).
  • Ability to work in a fast-paced environment and adapt solutions to changing business needs.
  • Experience with ETL technologies like Airflow and Airbyte.
  • Production experience with streaming systems like Kafka.
  • Exposure to infrastructure, DevOps, and Infrastructure as Code (IaaC).
  • Deep knowledge of distributed systems.

Skills

Data Engineering
Data Management
Scalability
Financial Transactions
Customer Data
API Logs
System Metrics

Alpaca

API-first brokerage for stock trading

About Alpaca

Alpaca Securities LLC operates in the stock brokerage industry by providing an API-first brokerage service that allows other businesses to create their own trading applications. This service enables companies to integrate stock trading functionality into their platforms without the need to become brokers themselves, saving them time and resources. Alpaca's API supports seamless trading experiences for users and includes features like Local Currency Trading, which allows international investors to trade US stocks in their local currency. Additionally, Alpaca offers crypto wallets and coin pair trading, expanding the financial services available to its clients. Unlike traditional brokers, Alpaca focuses on a business-to-business model, catering primarily to other companies that want to offer trading services to their customers. The goal of Alpaca is to simplify the trading process for businesses and their users while providing a secure and efficient platform for executing trades.

San Mateo, CaliforniaHeadquarters
2015Year Founded
$84.5MTotal Funding
CONVERTIBLECompany Stage
Fintech, Financial ServicesIndustries
201-500Employees

Benefits

Competitive salary & stock options
Medical, dental, & vision
Home office setup stipend
Monthly Brex Card stipend

Risks

Increased competition from fintech platforms like GUGU offering commission-free trading.
Potential regulatory challenges in international markets may complicate Alpaca's expansion.
Self-clearing transition introduces operational risks in managing settlement processes.

Differentiation

Alpaca offers API-first brokerage services, enabling businesses to build trading applications.
Alpaca supports local currency trading, simplifying US stock trading for international investors.
Alpaca provides crypto wallets and coin pair trading, expanding financial services for clients.

Upsides

Alpaca's self-clearing transition enhances asset transfers and securities lending opportunities.
Partnership with Derayah Financial accelerates Middle Eastern business expansion for Alpaca.
Alpaca's limit orders and extended hours trading for fractional shares lead retail trading.

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